


The Ballad of Mr McGarry's US Government and Politics AP class

by hesamatador



Category: The West Wing
Genre: F/M, M/M, also sam is gay and you cannot persuade me otherwise, josh is dumb and in love, just a self indulgent high-school au that nobody asked for, toby quietly pining for cj
Language: English
Status: In-Progress
Published: 2021-02-08
Updated: 2021-02-08
Packaged: 2021-03-13 07:47:32
Rating: Teen And Up Audiences
Warnings: No Archive Warnings Apply
Chapters: 1
Words: 1,627
Publisher: archiveofourown.org
Story URL: https://archiveofourown.org/works/29274930
Author URL: https://archiveofourown.org/users/hesamatador/pseuds/hesamatador
Summary: “Principal Bartlet says if I want to join Mr McGarry’s class, I’ve got to get a seventy in my next social studies test.” She explains. “I want you to help me study.”
Relationships: Josh Lyman/Donna Moss
Comments: 9
Kudos: 41





	The Ballad of Mr McGarry's US Government and Politics AP class

**Author's Note:**

> first stab at posting anything i've written so i'm sorry if it sucks

He wrote her a valentines card once. 

Donna Moss. 

When he was six. (She was five). 

He poured out his piggy bank into a sock and spent his pennies on craft card and glitter. 

Joanie let him borrow her scissors, and her glue. He spent the evening spread eagled on his bedroom carpet, cutting and sticking and slowly - ever so slowly - scribing out in his very best felt pen, with his very neatest handwriting:

Happy Valentines Day Donnatella. 

Love from Josh.

He had his tongue poking out the side of his mouth the whole time. Concentrating. Ever so hard. It had to be perfect. 

He shows Joanie when he’s done. Because she’s a girl. She ought to know if it’s the kind of thing girls would like. Joanie’s had lots of valentines cards, so she’ll know what makes a good one, she’ll know what will make Donna smile. 

Joanie knows Donna. She’s the chatty little girl with blonde pigtails and both her front teeth missing that comes round for dinner sometimes. She wears her siblings’ hand-me-down clothes and outwits Josh, in the most peculiar of subject areas, even though she’s a year his junior. 

Joanie says the card is great. Donna’s gonna love it, she tells him. Cause she knows she will. 

She smiles at the slightly wonky glitter-heart on the front, doesn’t tell him that he has spelt valentines wrong, ruffles his hair and promises to put it in her school bag so they won't forget it tomorrow. 

Later, she goes to make them popcorn. 

He never gives Donna the card. 

Somewhere, in the ashes of the Lyman’s old house, are the remains of Joanie’s old backpack, the glittery cinders of Josh’s carefully-crafted card, 

and Joanie. 

-

He doesn’t see her so much in school. She’s a grade below him and people don’t seem to mix enough for them to sit together at lunch and not be stared at. 

But he misses her.

She hasn’t come round his house since Joanie died and he doesn’t know if it’s been long enough yet for it to be ok for him to have fun again. 

It seems appropriate, in his head, that he hasn’t really seen Donna since the fire. In his head, Donna Moss represents all the good things. She’s all toothy smiles and sky-coloured eyes and bright, delighted happiness. In his head, Donna and sadness don’t fit together. 

He thinks he’d find it difficult to stay sad all the time if he still watched cartoons with her after school, if they still played games in her yard on weekends. 

But he needs to be sad at the moment. So they don’t do those things. 

-

For some inexplicable reason, the house they buy after the fire is bigger. Josh can’t make sense of it, but he couldn’t make sense of much for a long time afterwards. 

His family rallies together, they stay very tight and very closed for a while. 

And when they eventually open back up again, things go on. 

His mom starts to take them on bizarre weekend trips again, and his dad goes back to gleefully admonishing the squirrels that reach the birdfeeder. 

Donna’s new front teeth grow in. And she does a presentation in school assembly. She tells a bad joke and Josh laughs. Nobody else does, and they make fun of her at recess but she doesn’t care because she spots dimples amongst the audience and that makes her grin.

She hasn’t seen them in a while.

-

He likes to sit behind her on the bus. Cause her hair looks like sunshine and he can always get her attention by tugging her pigtails. 

He teases her. And she always rises to it. Always. 

She crosses her arms and huffs “Joosh!” and turns around and admonishes him. 

Sometimes, when he’ll rest his chin on the back of her seat, she’ll pinch his ear until he capitulates to her demands, promising not to touch her pigtails. 

But he always does the next day. 

And the day after that. 

-

He can’t pinpoint when their dynamic took a shift.

But it did. 

They each seem to tilt away from their shared axis.

It’s probably when he moves up to junior high. 

Donna spends her time with Ginger and Cathy and Bonnie. Josh spends his with Sam and Matt and Mike. 

They grow apart a little. 

-

She gets a boyfriend in her first year of high school. 

Freddie Briggs is blonde and he plays football and he’s lots of things Josh isn’t.

(Like, for example, Donna’s).

He refuses to be jealous.

(As Toby points out to him, he doesn’t quite manage non-jealousy well).

He has girlfriends. He has Mandy Hampton for a while (whom CJ dislikes so much she actually cheers when they break up) and then he goes out with Amy Gardner.

(Her name will forever be the cue for CJ, Sam and Toby to share knowing looks of concern and disapproval). 

Their relationship ends up brittle and fraught. They were always dressed for battle, but somewhere along the way he seemed to misplace his armour. And though he refuses not to meet a swing of her sword with one of his own, his arms end up tired of the sport.

It had been so much fun to begin with. He doesn’t quite know when the fun stopped.

Eventually they settle that their relationship is probably best suited to occasional fucking rather than something with any semblance of commitment.

(CJ says she will only utter a cheer over this break up when they stop sleeping with each other once and for all).

-

Donna is still part of his life. 

He sees her around school, in the corridors or at big games, and her eyes still shine like midday skies and her smile still hits him right in his chest, pulls his dimples into being but she doesn’t take up nearly as big of a slice of his life as he wishes she did. 

Sometimes he wishes she still had pigtails he could pull when he wanted to talk to her. 

-

Mr McGarry’s US Government and Politics AP class is the whirlwind around which he spends his life now. 

It’s where he and Sam and CJ and Toby are allowed to hit their stride. 

Mr McGarry is a passionate teacher and a brilliant political mind. He doesn’t take slackers (he does, however, permit smart asses, as long as their points are well made) and takes no shit, but will frequently lament stories of President Andrew Jackson, the making of sausages, and where he is planning on going for dinner on an evening, and which particular expensive and intricate meal he plans on trying. 

Donna has read half the reading list. 

She sees the seniors in the library after the class is over, their tight-knit group throwing pens and smiles and whip-quick arguments as though they’re already prepared to lobby their way into operating the democratic party. 

After reading an article Toby Ziegler had written under his by-line in the school paper, she thinks perhaps they are. 

It’s not like they’re a clique the rest of the school is in particular admiration of; they’re really just a more charming brand of nerd, but Donna likes their passion and she misses that kind of drive in her current classes. 

It’s not that she doesn’t like them. In fact the problem is more that she likes pretty much everything, from her 19th Century English Literature class to advanced calculus, she finds learning just about anything interests her, but there’s nothing to which she holds a particular affinity. 

She’s tried just about everything. 

She’s tried nutrition class, sculpture class, drama class. She’s tried poetry, pottery and Portuguese. She’s tried learning Hebrew, French, woodwork, biology, psychology, trigonometry and marching band. 

She liked all of them. But none of them lit a fire under her. 

None of them got her as hopeful as government funding for education makes Sam Seaborn or as passionate as free health-care makes Josh Lyman or as angry as lack of gun legislation makes C.J. Cregg. 

She wants something that riles her up that much, something she desperately wants to fight for, something she wholeheartedly believes in. 

She thinks she can be good at Mr McGarry’s US Government and Politics AP class. 

She thinks they’ll find her valuable. 

Which is what she tells Principal Bartlet.

-

They’re in Augustines. 

Him and Sam and Toby and CJ. 

He’s hoping to catch a flash of blonde-haired sunshine. (Donna works there, you see. She wears an adorable apron and takes people’s orders and always nabs a couple of his fries off his plate). 

He’s pleased to find her there. Stood with Will Bailey behind the bar, both of them spooning copious amounts of ice cream in the blenders, laughing at something he can’t hear but takes delight in anyway, because he loves to see her laugh. 

When he and Sam go up to give their order, (Josh always volunteers to order, Toby always knows why), instead of beginning with their ritualised teasing, she says, bluntly and without preamble:

“I need a seventy.”

His mouth opens in that way it does on the rare occasion he is confused, and he cocks his head to the side in question. 

“Principal Bartlet says if I want to join Mr McGarry’s class, I’ve got to get a seventy in my next social studies test.” She explains. “I want you to help me study.”

There’s no one she knows, Mr McGarry aside, that knows more about government and politics than Josh. 

There’s certainly no one she knows that brags about how much they know about government and politics than Josh. 

She hadn’t really posed it as a question, but he answers with his dimples and a simple:

“Ahkay.”


End file.
